There are a small number of terminal emulators I would be happy to use as daily drivers and most of them have been named here but my default is kitty. It supports everything I need and a lot I don’t and doesn’t have any showstoppers. All the modern terminal implementations are performant enough. I used real terminals like vt-100s and vt-220s. Everything we have today is awesome by comparison. We fetishize performance and features too much. Once you have something that works there isn’t much reason to change IMO.
I’m using the ddterm gnome extension, and it’s been the best I’ve tried so far. Lots of customization, very few bugs, and does exactly what you need it to with no bells or whistles to distract you.
I keep a Gnome Shell instance always running with a Screen session. However, what I actually use to run CLI commands is Emacs Shell, built-in to Emacs.
Emacs Shell has most of the bells and whistles you get from things like Fish shell. So I like to use Dash, a minimal POSIX shell that is much lighter weight than Bash, Zsh, or Fish. Dash provides no features – no tab completion, no history, no line editing – and I have Emacs add all of those features on top of Dash for me. It is amazing what a good, scriptable terminal emulator can accomplish.
Emacs Shell can be scripted using the same scripting language it uses to script the editor, file browser, window manager, and everything else. So you can script the shell to search for regular expressions and make things clickable with the mouse, or only display portions of output, creating simple interactive views around shell commands. You can bind certain click buttons or keystrokes in the editor or file manager to run shell commands in new windows. You can script the shell with “expect”-like behavior (automatically input responses to certain prompts). You can capture and collate the output of multiple commands running in parallel.
For those kitty users, have anyone been able to use fonts not in the list kitty support? I only use Terminus (OTB) fonts on terminal, and when trying kitty out, I found no way to get it to use Terminus (I could only select between those supported by kitty).
Kitty can’t use bitmap fonts because of how it draws to screen & bitmap fonts don’t scale. You would need a different terminal for bitmap fonts or choose a different font.
It looks like, though OTB (opentype bitmap fonts) are different than plain bitmap fonts, and are actually supported by pango. Alacritty allows me to use Terminus OTB fonts for example. There are other true type fonts which are also sort of my plan B, which are not supported by kitty either, as mentioned, I wanted to see if there’s a way not just to select between the list kitty offers, which is sort of limited. At any rate if not Terminus, I don’t really like much my plan B true type fonts much…
I moved to Iosevka (custom) a few years back after a) switching to Kitty & b) realizing my eyesight was getting worse so I needed a bigger font than what Terminus provides
Tmux allows you to reconnect to a session, and helps guarantee that you will always be able to get back to your long running processes. For important long running processes, I still use tmux with mosh, because if the mosh client is killed (or you’re trying to “re-attach” from a different device, mosh won’t let you “re-attach” to that “session”.
Mosh allows you to roam, and suspend your machine, and whenever you resume it again, whatever network you’re now on, the connection is basically instantly re-established. You can often roam from WiFi to cellular data without even noticing. (Great when working from a phone, or just a laptop)
In my opinion, they are mostly orthogonal (and complementary).
Here’s the list of features from the home page. I’ve added my own comments after ‘’. If there is no ‘’, then the feature doesn’t exist for tmux (because it’s outside the scope of tmux):
Change IP. Stay connected. Mosh automatically roams as you move between Internet connections. Use Wi-Fi on the train, Ethernet in a hotel, and LTE on a beach: you’ll stay logged in. Most network programs lose their connections after roaming, including SSH and Web apps like Gmail. Mosh is different.
Makes for sweet dreams. With Mosh, you can put your laptop to sleep and wake it up later, keeping your connection intact. If your Internet connection drops, Mosh will warn you — but the connection resumes when network service comes back.
Get rid of network lag. SSH waits for the server’s reply before showing you your own typing. That can make for a lousy user interface. Mosh is different: it gives an instant response to typing, deleting, and line editing. It does this adaptively and works even in full-screen programs like emacs and vim. On a bad connection, outstanding predictions are underlined so you won’t be misled.
No privileged code. No daemon. * Same for tmux, but that’s less interesting since tmux is not a network service You don’t need to be the superuser to install or run Mosh. The client and server are executables run by an ordinary user and last only for the life of the connection.
Same login method. * Not really relevant to tmux, which doesn’t handle auth Mosh doesn’t listen on network ports or authenticate users. The mosh client logs in to the server via SSH, and users present the same credentials (e.g., password, public key) as before. Then Mosh runs the mosh-server remotely and connects to it over UDP.
Runs inside your terminal, but better. * This is common to both Mosh is a command-line program, like ssh. You can use it inside xterm, gnome-terminal, urxvt, Terminal.app, iTerm, emacs, screen, or tmux. But mosh was designed from scratch and supports just one character set: UTF-8. It fixes Unicode bugs in other terminals and in SSH.
Control-C works great. * Tmux can help with this too Unlike SSH, mosh’s UDP-based protocol handles packet loss gracefully, and sets the frame rate based on network conditions. Mosh doesn’t fill up network buffers, so Control-C always works to halt a runaway process.
I have been using Fedora Workstation for years now, and I plan to switch to the KDE spin when Fedora 40 is released. I will absolutely never miss the rolling release model, and Fedora has been stable enough that I basically never have any issues. You get updates quickly, but even with the speed it manages to be very stable, at least compared to bleeding edge distros like Arch. There are still MANY things you can use the Arch wiki for in Fedora, so it’s still my first place to check for most things. But there are also forums for Fedora, and lots of community members that have answered questions in those forums, just not to the extent of something like Ubuntu. It is mainstream enough that you can find most things with Linux releases packaged for it, so I haven’t had an issue with compatibility, either. It’s overall a very solid choice, and I would recommend it.
Sorry folks was too busy today, maybe I'll get to it tomorrow, but I don't know. Might take til saturday for me to try your suggestions, but I am very thankful for every reply I got
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